The World's Most Dangerous Place (9 page)

Presenting himself as a rallying point for outraged Somali nationalism, Aweys and his allies launched a ferocious guerrilla campaign against the TFG and their Ethiopian supporters, whom they portrayed not just as infidels but as proxies of Uncle Sam, the Great Satan himself. Soon they were being reinforced by foreign jihadis from around the world, bent on a fight against the latest army of
kuffar
to taint holy Muslim soil. The hardliners were badly divided at first, and even fought each other, notably in a ferocious battle for control of the important southern port of Kismayo in 2008. But the factions overcame their differences and eventually united under the banner of al-Shabaab in 2010, with Sheikh Aweys emerging as their spiritual head. As a former colonel, Aweys insisted that his new troops were properly drilled and trained. The force that emerged was highly disciplined by Somali standards. Later propaganda videos made much of their ability to parade in formation and to march in time. Many units even wore matching camouflage uniforms beneath their keffiyeh-swathed heads, adding to the impression that they were, as they claimed to be, a legitimate army of national liberation. The world’s newest and potentially most dangerous Islamist insurgency had come of age.

None of this was good news for the surviving members of Aden’s family. The fighting in Ethiopian-occupied Mogadishu was intermittent, but could flare up at any time, deadly and unpredictable. After the destruction of Aden’s parents’ shop – later made irreparable when al-Shabaab dug a communications trench through the middle of it – he and his siblings went to live in a neighbouring district with an aunt and uncle who had moved, like them, from Tieglow to Mogadishu some years before. Soon afterwards, the youngest of the children, Aden’s nine-year-old sister Xawl,
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was shot through the kidney by a stray bullet. Then their uncle, a bus driver, was killed by Ethiopian army gunfire as he plied his usual route near the port.

At sixteen, Aden was now his dwindling family’s main breadwinner. Remarkably, considering the dangers of travelling about the city, he continued to attend school, where he was employed as an assistant teacher when he was not in class himself. He was paid between $15 and $20 a month. In 2008, though, even this meagre income dried up as the school was finally forced to close by the fighting.

‘I never managed to graduate,’ he said sadly. ‘I never won any certificates to help get me a good job.’

He was lucky to find work as a porter at the Keysaney Hospital, a converted prison in the north of the city, which always seemed to be overflowing with maimed civilians and was itself frequently shot at or shelled. Aden’s 14-year-old brother, Mohammed, briefly managed to open a stall in the Bakara Market, a smaller version of the bric-a-brac shop his parents had run. Aden helped him when he wasn’t at the hospital, but the venture came to an end when the
shop next door was hit by a shell which started a fire that destroyed all his stock. Meanwhile his sister Xawl, now eleven years old and only recently recovered from the bullet that had cost her a kidney, was hit again, this time in the head by a fragment of shrapnel.

The fighting in the city the following year, 2009, was the fiercest Aden had ever experienced. Al-Shabaab had driven the last Ethiopian soldiers from Somalia by then, leaving the TFG defended by an uncertain alliance of clan militias, supported by an African Union peace-keeping force judged by most to be still too small and under-equipped to hold the line. As the militants closed in on the AMISOM base, all flights in and out of the airport were suspended, heightening the sense of isolation and abandonment among the city’s beleaguered inhabitants.

‘The shelling from both sides was indiscriminate. Our house was shaking from the rocket fire. It went on 24 hours a day, for weeks. I remember the hunger when we ran out of food. It was impossible to leave the house to search for more . . . Our neighbour was killed during one fight for our street. He lay outside, and no one could bury him. If you stuck a finger outside, it would be shot off. There were a dozen bullet holes in our door . . . I hid under a bed, and prayed to Allah. I was sure I was going to die.’

It was Mohammed who cracked first under the strain.

‘He couldn’t stay in Mogadishu any more,’ said Aden. ‘He told me: “I prefer to die than to go on living like this.” The pressure was too much for him. He had to go somewhere safe.’

Such places were not easy to find in Somalia, though. Mohammed decided instead to make the perilous journey to Yemen, adding another epic subplot to the family saga. Not long after his fifteenth birthday he took the last few dollars from the family savings tin, crossed through al-Shabaab lines and bought a
place on a truck heading north to the port of Bossasso. Here he paid $80 to a gang of people-smugglers to take him across the Gulf of Aden. The boat was overloaded, however, and half way across when the weather turned rough, the smugglers forced some of their passengers to walk the plank. Anyone who resisted or even objected was either shot or beaten to death.
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Mohammed, thankfully, survived to tell Aden the tale in a phone call a few weeks later, by which time he was somewhere near Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, hoping to find work as a labourer.

‘My brother is very brave,’ Aden said.

For the last eight months, though, there had been no word from Yemen. Aden was naturally desperately worried. He had heard that it might be possible to trace his brother through the International Committee for the Red Cross, but only if Mohammed had thought to register himself with them when he arrived in Yemen, and he had no idea if his brother had done this.

‘I just hope he isn’t dead,’ he shrugged.

Aden was also anxious to escape Mogadishu in 2009. The city was becoming impossibly dangerous, with suicide bombings ever more common, although even Somalis were shocked by an attack in December at the Shamo Hotel that killed twenty-five people, including three government ministers, and injured sixty more. Aden had no time for the moral equivocation displayed by Colonel Kiyungo. The attack, he said, was ‘very evil’. Most of the dead were medical students who had gathered for a university enrolment ceremony, a rare cause for celebration in Mogadishu that had
drawn a crowd of hundreds. Carnival turned to carnage when the bomber, who was dressed as a woman, approached the speakers’ panel and said ‘Salaam’ – Peace – before detonating the explosive belt hidden beneath his jilbab. Sheikh Sharif called the atrocity ‘a national disaster’ and blamed al-Shabaab, although they denied responsibility; according to one report, the bomber was a 23-year-old loner from Denmark.
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Whoever was responsible, al-Shabaab, now unconstrained by any rival ICU faction and in full battle cry, had become a truly terrifying organization. As a young man of fighting age, Aden was in particular danger.

‘The streets were filled with al-Shabaab press gangs,’ he recalled. ‘All men were targeted, but especially young men like me. And so I ran, alone, back to Tieglow.’

His home town, however, was not the place he remembered. Half the population had disappeared, either killed or driven out by the fighting or the famine. Many had fled to refugee camps in Ethiopia, or Kenya, or further abroad; and al-Shabaab, he discovered, were as firmly in charge here as in Mogadishu. Empty houses were looted or squatted in. Houses still in use were requisitioned at gunpoint. Aden had planned to hide in the countryside with any family friend or distant relative he could find, but he was picked up almost immediately by an al-Shabaab patrol, and imprisoned.

‘There were twenty-two of us, all young men like me,’ he recalled. ‘They were trying to make us join them. We were shackled together and put in a cell four metres square. For three days and nights they preached at us – especially at night. We were not permitted to sleep, or eat, or to go outside except at prayer time. They kept asking, “Are you ready to martyr yourselves, are you ready to die?”’

The pressure was intense, and eventually around twelve of the captives succumbed. Aden knew one of them slightly, a lad his age called Gumo Shahi
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from Beledwayne, 100 kilometres away. Gumo’s home had been destroyed in recent fighting, and his family, always very poor, were now destitute. He agreed to join al-Shabaab when he heard that a small salary was on offer.

‘I stayed in touch with Gumo for a while,’ said Aden. ‘He used to call me from Bur, near Baidoa, and then from central Somalia. He changed his mind about al-Shabaab. He said they never paid him anything. They only gave him food to eat. But it was too dangerous to desert, and then he was killed in fighting near Guri’el.’

Gumo’s new career had lasted all of two months.

Aden was not fooled by al-Shabaab’s promises. He had seen enough of them in Mogadishu to know what they were about, and had no intention of fighting for their cause, let alone dying for it. He spoke as little as possible and kept his eyes on the ground and eventually his captors grew bored of taunting him and let him go. Aden’s contempt for them was total. There was no manufacturing the hard, bright look in his eye as he listed a long catalogue of abuses.

‘They stop people from playing football – even kids. They beat people for being late for prayers; teachers are beaten for teaching girls. If you have a mobile phone, they check to see if you have any films or music on it. They even check the ringtone. And if they do not like it they will destroy the phone and take your money and make you
swallow
the SIM card . . . Their culture has nothing to do
with us. Somalis are naturally moderate, not extremists. We can’t make sense of any of this.’

In one notorious example of over-zealousness, in Jowhar in April 2010, al-Shabaab banned the use of bells in schools, on the grounds that bells were ‘a sign of the Christian churches’; henceforth, the teachers were to signal the end of class by clapping their hands.

‘What they are doing has nothing to do with Islam,’ Aden repeated. ‘They just want to control people.’

(Their zealotry, however absurd, was no laughing matter for the Somalis forced to live with it. In 2009 in the Bakara Market in Mogadishu, a young man called Ismael Khalif Abdulle was arrested on what he later claimed were trumped-up charges of theft, and subjected to a Sharia punishment rarely practised in the Islamic world: cross-amputation. Along with three other youths, in front of a crowd forced by the militants to watch the spectacle, Abdulle’s right hand and left foot were hacked off, without anaesthetic, with a knife usually used for the slaughtering of camels. His suffering did not end there. A fortnight later the al-Shabaab commander Fuad Shangole, a Swedish passport-holder who for twelve years had run a mosque in Stockholm, arrived at the house where the four youths were recovering to announce that the judges had made a mistake. ‘He told us that our legs had been cut too low down, and would have to be shortened,’ Ismael Khalif explained later to a British reporter. ‘He took the end of my leg, and put three fingers above the stump and said: “That’s where it should be.”’ This time the operation was carried out with a plumber’s saw. Once again, there was no anaesthetic.
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)

To Aden, the hypocrisy implicit in the way they extorted money
from people in the name of Islam was almost worse than Shangole’s barbarity. In the coastal town of Marka in 2009, al-Shabaab decreed that gold fillings were a sign of vanity and therefore unIslamic. The decree was enforced by patrolling militiamen who mounted spot checks on the passing citizenry, and yanked out any offending teeth they found with pliers.
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Aden described how another gang took to stopping buses and ordering all young boys to drop their trousers to prove they were circumcised. If they were not, they were subjected to instant surgery with a kitchen knife, right there at the side of the road – a ‘service’ for which customers were charged $3.

‘These are bad, bad people,’ he concluded, shaking his head and clicking and sucking through his teeth in the Somali way. ‘They are not acting like human beings.’

Aden thought that al-Shabaab’s extreme youth was partly to blame.

‘Even the commanders are only nineteen or twenty,’ Aden explained. ‘They are very ignorant, and that ignorance is easily manipulated. They have no understanding of the world: no BBC, no Voice of America, no access to foreign media at all since 2009. They collect hordes of youngsters to do the cooking and the shoe-cleaning as well as the fighting . . . some of their recruits are as young as nine. If you tell them, “We are going into attack, we are going to destroy America”, they won’t question it; they will just reply, “OK: let’s go.”’

At the level of the street, normality had been replaced by a kind of mad children’s crusade where chaos and sadism ruled. It was like
Lord of the Flies
with automatic weapons. In the old days, said Aden, the young men of al-Shabaab would have been brought into line by their elders and betters. The problem was that the war had
destroyed that system. ‘It is not possible to convene a council of elders because there are no elders,’ he said.

The collapse of the old order had been exploited most of all, in his view, by brainwashing foreigners. It was well known that al-Shabaab’s leadership was mostly foreign. Did al-Shabaab’s fighters not have to wear ‘Pakistani’ clothes, the baggy trousers and long-tailed
shalwar kamiz
favoured across central Asia? In Mogadishu, furthermore, he had once seen with his own eyes Omar Hammami, the famous white American al-Shabaab leader known as Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, whose mother was a southern American Baptist and who was raised in Daphne, Alabama.

Al-Shabaab’s leaders, Aden believed, were engaged in a systematic assault on Somali values and culture. The destruction of an important Sufi shrine at Biyoley, 20 kilometres from Tieglow, was a case in point. Biyoley was the burial place of Sheikh Aweys Al-Barawi, a national hero in the late nineteenth century, as well as one of East Africa’s greatest proselytes for Qadiri Sufism.
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His grave attracted huge numbers of visitors each year, some of them from as far away as the Congo or the Comoros Islands.